The invention relates to a method of mounting a component to a substrate, for example the mounting of an optical component such as a laser chip to a substrate.
Recent developments in optical technology have led to the construction of laser chips and photosensor chips which have relatively small dimensions of the order of 200 microns. It is now proposed that these components should be mounted on substrates and accurately aligned with optical waveguides or other optical components. One of the difficulties with this is that it is difficult to hold the component accurately using a micromanipulator or the like during mounting of the component on a substrate.
A paper by M. Kobayashi et al entitled "Guided-Wave optical gate matrix switch" in the Proc. 11th European Conference on Optical Communication (pages 73-76) describes the mounting of a laser diode to a silicon heat sink. The heat sink is a slab of silicon which is apparently laid on the substrate. The laser diode cannot, however, be accurately positioned on the substrate.